From 2005 to 2009 the River Junction Poets hosted Poets Birthday Readings at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Saginaw (MI) to read and discuss poets and poetry. Events were planned around the birthdays of poets; the bookstore mentioned our events in its monthly Newsletter. When we sent a birthday card to the poet we celebrated, we included the Newsletter that mentioned the event. Several of those poets responded with Thank You notes. This blog serves an ongoing interest in poets and poetry.

It is hard to talk concretely about Ashbery's poetry, because his subject is, so often, aesthetic consciousness—what he calls "the experience of experience." On the one hand, the poems have the dashed-off look and feel of pop culture-inflected postmodernism, inspired by the radical innovations of Dada and French Surrealism. On the other hand, at their heart is a kind of high Romantic yearning for wholeness: In a sense the poems are simply about being unable to give up that longing. At the center of an Ashbery poem isn't usually a subject (à la Philip Larkin) but a feeling (à la Jackson Pollock). That feeling is conjured up by the interplay between aesthetic conviction and amiably bland bewilderment; amid all the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life is the enduring hope that, as one speaker puts it, "at last I shall see my complete face." The best thing to do, then, is not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music. It's only then, for most readers, that the meaning begins to leak through.

More recently (Dec 8, 2008), the Christian Science Monitor ran a little review of Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987. The review is helpful in understanding better how to read Ashbery's poetry. Here is an excerpt from that little book review:

Reading Ashbery involves the ability to make sudden shifts between slangy and literary language, between rational analysis and irrational intuition, and to fuse seemingly unrelated images from paintings, film, and daily life. His poems seem to narrate stories – but they are stories constantly interrupted by paradoxes and contradictions, all part of a storytelling sensibility that loves unsolved and unsolvable mysteries.

Call this volume of Ashbery’s work a training guide for imaginative calisthenics.

Another help in reading Ashbery's poems is to begin by saying 'Let me understand Ashbery's poetics.' Generally, once a reader understands a poet's poetics, that reader can more easily 'unlock' the meaning of that poet's poems. What is poetics? Well, this Wikipedia entry can tell you better than I can. How to understand Ashbery's poetics better requires, I believe, an understanding of the situation of poetry within Yeats and Eliot - and then understand that Ashbery felt the need to create something extra-Yeatsian, extra-Eliotian if you will. Whereas Yeats and Eliot especially despaired over the lack of a coherent expression capable of including all of experience, Ashbery joyfully goes about his own project of creating poetry that acknowledges and embraces some of the more salient challenges of our times, consumerism and the formation of self being among them.

David Herd has written a book that should prove helpful as well in reading poems by Ashbery. Published by Manchester University Press, John Ashbery and American Poetry was reviewed in The Guardian (March 10, 2001) by Robert Potts. Here is the first paragraph from that review:

"I live with this paradox; on the one hand, I am an important poet, read by younger writers, and on the other hand, nobody understands me. I am often asked to account for this state of affairs, but I can't." This self-assessment by the American poet John Ashbery is fair and succinct. Much admired, winner of many prizes, stylistically over-influential, Ashbery has nonetheless provoked hostility and scepticism from uncomprehending readers. His poems slide through a variety of voices and styles with quickfire cuts between sensations, comments and events; sometimes the disruption of expectation is so frequent that it becomes easy for a sceptical or lazy reader to feel that the poems are nothing more than a random agglomeration of words, images, quotations and phrases.

5 comments:

"The best thing to do, then, is not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music" is a nice way to frame it. To me, Ashberry seems to want to follow a line with the most unlikely next line, to constantly create surprise. Easier said than done. But even more remarkable is how the poem still coheres in its way.

Ashbery's stated goal was to create something that critics wouldn't even be able to talk about. He's come very close to that, I believe - if he hasn't actually achieved it. For me it's been helpful to read 'Self-Portrait' with my friend Jack. We read aloud, at our own pace, for two hours a week, discussing the poems as we go.

I think we should read JA the way we listen to music - no one ever asks of music - what does it mean?? That is the only way I think to get to it, I think - and then, things filter in: meaning, phrases, sounds, love etc.

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